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If you’re a freelancer and you’ve led or managed a complex PCB design project, the need to involve your customer in the product development process may not be obvious. Your customer is probably a project manager at a bigger company, so they’ll be overseeing progress on the project and leading communication with you. If you work on a small team or as part of a large organization, involving customers in product development can be time-consuming...

Circuit designers and board designers like to use S-parameters to describe signal behavior as it passes through an interconnect. These important parameters tend to get overgeneralized (in my opinion), and there are other important quantities that may be easier to calculate if you use some different parameters. In particular, a transmission line transfer function is one important quantity used for signal integrity calculations and simulations...

If you look at a microwave electronics design textbook, you’ll see a number of parameters that are used to describe N-port networks. S-parameters, ABCD parameters, and H-parameters–all have their place in PCB design and analysis. These days, many important concepts in analog signal integrity are now critical for determining digital signal integrity, and the analysis tools used by the microwave community must be transferred to the digital...

Over the last 20 years, electronic devices have become increasingly sophisticated. Less than two decades ago, just having a mobile phone to make calls was rare; today, our phones power our lives. To meet the growing demand for smartphone technology, technology has become faster, more functional, and intuitive. Improvements to the component base have streamlined processes while reducing manufacturing costs. Smartphones use higher-frequency...

Every so often, I receive an interesting question about routing, layout, signal integrity, or the like. I try to respond to these when I’m not too busy, but sometimes one of these catches my eye and I feel the need to get the answer out to more designers. Without further adieu, here’s a question I received about stripline vs. microstrip width required for controlled impedance. I have an inquiry about microstrip and stripline. Is it possible to...

Data rate and bandwidth are sometimes used interchangeably, thanks largely to advertising firms and the media, who turned an important technical term from analog circuit design into a buzzword. The word “bandwidth” is now misused to the point where it has unintentionally taken on a somewhat related meaning from ADC design. In PCB design and circuit design, bandwidth sometimes has a clear distinction that has nothing to do with data rate, and...

The first time I read about impulse response functions, it was in the context of stochastic calculus while working on a portfolio management paper. This was before I started working in the electronics industry. I didn’t go so deep as to extract impulse response functions to examine how sudden changes in asset prices are interrelated, but the underlying concept is extremely valuable for understanding physical systems. Once I started working on...

PCI-SIG has been busy pushing the limits on standardized data rates between processors and computer peripherals. While the standards group doesn’t have a direct hand in component development, the release of the PCIe 5.0 specification in 2019 and the upcoming release of the PCIe 6.0 specification in 2021 shows a clear intent to standardize peripherals for data-hungry applications. Some applications will inevitably include AI in the data center, 5G...

Differential pairs have helped solve some basic signal integrity problems, and modern CAD tools make them easy to design and route. However, differential pairs are not the cure-all for every signal integrity problem, despite their usefulness in suppressing common-mode noise at a low-level receiver. There is one question that always gets asked when discussing differential pair routing: do these traces need a ground plane? Sometimes, the answer to...